Max Hastings doesn’t love Israel or Israelis anymore. That’s the general drift of this article in which starts by describing his coverage of the Yom Kippur War as a war correspondent.

Says Hastings:

In those days I loved those people, and boundlessly admired their achievement.

He then goes on to recount how the affair went sour:

Between the late 1970s and 1990s, I was one of those foreigners who progressively fell out of love with Israel. I became persuaded that the arrogance of its faith in its own military power had induced its people to go far beyond a belief in defending their own society, to support a polity committed to perpetuating a great historic injustice against the Palestinians […] Israel has tested to destruction the utility of force in achieving its security. It is not enough to assert proudly that the Jewish state remains a democracy and haven of free speech in a region in which neither of these precious things is much in evidence, if that same democracy behaves in a fashion which denies mercy to the weak. For someone like me, who enjoyed a love affair with Israel 40 years ago, it is heart-breaking to see the story come to such a pass. It is because so many of us so much want to see Israel prosper in security and peace that we share a sense of tragedy that 61 years after the state was born amid such lofty ideals.

There’s seldom much logic about how one falls in or out of love but as Hastings has chosen to give reasons for his disenchantment with Israel I’d like to point out that they don’t make a great deal of sense.

In October 1973, when Hastings passion for Israel was at its apogee, the Jews’ state had already been occupying the Occupied Territories for seven years and the settler movement had got off to a healthy start with the connivance of Labor governments. In 1956 it had conspired with France and Britain to fight an entirely unnecessary war against Egypt, had only in 1966 released its own Arab citizens from military government and was already in possession of a considerable nuclear arsenal. Since the day of its foundation it had also relied on a policy of cross-border retaliation to deter terrorists. And, of course, the basic facts regarding the founding of Israel weren’t exactly a secret for anyone with an eye for history. In spite of all these unlovely facts, Max fell in love with Israel.

The period of Max’s disenchantment has coincided with Israel withdrawing from the Sinai and making peace with Egypt, settling its difference and making peace with Jordan, abandoning its imperial ambitions in Lebanon, recognizing and negotiating with the PLO, withdrawing from Gaza and becoming all too aware of the limits of its conventional military power for the achievement of political goals.

It’s said that true love knows no reason and the evolution of Max’s feelings towards Israel tends to confirm this. He loved it when it had the Palestinians too scared to let loose a squeak of protest, when it was winning bloody victories in conventional conflicts and when all of its neighbors were struggling to destroy it. Now that not all of them are and it’s locked in a cruel and untelegenic struggle with Iran and its proxies, his feelings have turned to bitterness and contempt.

No wonder Israelis often feel that they’ll be damned by foreign liberal opinion no matter what they do.